Blue Hour

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0393065421

Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States s most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward...

Author	Mary Szybist
ISBN	1555976352

The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
                        -from “The Troubadours etc.”
 
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880015578

Robert Hass demonstrates once again the unmistakable intelligence and original voice that have won him both literary acclaim and the affection of a broad general readership. Here Hass extends and deepens his ongoing explorations of nature and human history, solitude, and the bonds of children,...

Author	Anna Kamieńska
ISBN	1557255288

Anna Kamienska came of age during the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and lived under Communism. These experiences, as well as the sudden death of her husband, led her to engagement with the Bible and the great religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Her poems record the struggles of a rational...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0060957956

Since, 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0252022106

A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered....

Author	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822956489

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of...

Author	Jorie Graham
ISBN	0691013357

"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence,...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555974805

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	0393329623

This is a great collection. I can't get over how well she uses image, how image opens and opens and you become swept up in it, and suddenly see that you've been privy to an entire story that now, in a way, has become part of your own life. There's much sensuality, some humor, tremendous tenderness and joy.

The...

Author	Michael Dickman
ISBN	1556592892

"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly

"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length...

Author	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	1556592760

“Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems bristle with imperatives: ‘confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.’ There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy’s kidding. Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around,...

Author

Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor...

Author	Marie Howe
ISBN	0393041999

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe, 68pp. We need more poetry, all of us. Buy this little book.

My Mother's Body

Bless my mother's body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,

grew louder. From inside her body I heard...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0375711775

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.

The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion...

Author	Denise Levertov
ISBN	0811214583

A CRYPTIC SIGN

August. The woods are silent.
No sway of treetops, no skitter of squirrels,
no startled bird. Sky fragments
in rifts of canopy,
palest silken blue.

AWARE

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among
themselves...

Author	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556592736

C.D. Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”

Rising,...

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1929918488

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader...

Author	Anne Carson
ISBN	0375707565

Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.

In Men in the...

Author	Dawn Lundy Martin
ISBN	1937658287

Dawn Lundy Martin's Life in a Box is a Pretty Life investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues...

Author	Katherine Larson
ISBN	0300169205

Katherine Larson is the winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. With Radial Symmetry, she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's...